The Demography of Baltimore City: Sources

Tracking the changes over time in the distribution and character of the population of Baltimore is complicated by the ever changing and ill-defined boundaries of Federal and Police census taking, and neighborhood definitions over the City’s history, but with Heritage Quest and Ancestry.com’s digitizationand indexing of the census records and the widespread availability of ward, block and street level mapping, it is possible to isolate place and people within the bounds of the city in studying change over time.

Once the researcher is familiar with the physical and general demographic changes that take place over time in Baltimore, then a thorough grounding in the general secondary literature on the history of the city is required.